Brumar, there are things that are more pertinent to electing a President than what a radio station is doing.
Savagery takes US, UK to new lows
CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA
TIMES NEWS NETWORK [ SATURDAY, MAY 08, 2004 08:50:25 PM ]
The world's moral policemen have been hit. And hit hard. The sadistic abuse by US and British troops of Iraqi prisoners has horrified the world. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warns that worse could come with the release of more videos, even as he said he wouldn't resign "simply because people try to make a political issue out of it". The liberators who accused others of torture are themselves the tormentors. Will the coalition be able to salvage their reputations? Sunday Times finds out...
WASHINGTON: On the last working day of April each year, the US State Department rolls out an annual report chronicling human rights abuses across the world. Compiled from reports by human rights organisations and its embassies and consulates worldwide, the report and the ritual attached to it, attests to the US standing as the world’s moral guardian. Like the human rights report, Washington also issues annual reports on international terrorism, religious persecution, drug trafficking and sundry other ills afflicting the world. WHAT A SHAM: But over the last few years, the reports have begun to be taken less seriously. Washington’s foreign press corps, which once rushed to see what strictures the world’s moral policeman had passed on their countries, now yawn at the prospect of reading reports that hardly seem to vary from year to year, not the speak of the duplicity that appears to accompany them. Washington finds ways to wink at the excesses of its allies while excoriating its enemies. For instance, Washington has continually disregarded the most egregious proliferation by Pakistan while crying murder over other states. Cuba is roasted for its record, but Saudi Arabia is criticised but winked at. The reports ritual has become such a scandal or a joke that China, a country that’s always at the receiving end of American rebuke, now sneers at Washington by bringing out its own version of US inadequacies. Most other countries simply ignore the reports. This year, the release of the human rights report coincided with the revelations about the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. For Washington, the timing could not have been more inapt. Embarrassed US officials were forced to defer release of the report even as a firestorm erupted over the prisoner abuse issue. A single picture showing 21-year-old US army private Lynndie England grinning as she points at the penis of a naked Iraqi man forced to masturbate has effectively screwed the US on the human rights front. MORAL COMPASS: Stories of American excesses are rare, but hardly new. Despite its questionable interventionist record in Vietnam and many other places, Washington seemed to have recovered its moral compass in the 1990s. In fact, tacit US support to the Taliban in Afghanistan was reversed after the then Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, saw firsthand the excesses of the fundamentalists, especially on women. Clinton himself did not sign on to many covert operations that required the US to break international law. For a brief while under the Clinton administration, Washington even rolled out a concert of democracies aimed at celebrating countries that had stuck to the long hard path.
George Bush came to office promising humility and international engagement premised on respect for all countries. Then came 9/11, a catastrophic event that completely unhinged the US, and in the eyes of many, distorted its international perspective.
In retrospect, Bush’s claim to humility and compassion might seem questionable. During his tenure as Texas governor, more than 150 prisoners were served the death penalty, leading Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other international monitoring authorities to describe it as a barbaric, error-ridden programme of state-sponsored killing. In fact, a local paper once carried an editorial headlined: George Bush: Murderer? But Bush remained unmoved. He also, evidently, nursed a grudge against Saddam Hussein for surviving and twitting his father George Bush Sr.
US EXCESSES: Following 9/11, as America’s war on terrorism moved into top gear — and down unchartered roads — US excesses began to be spotted and reported. Whether it was the overwriting of domestic laws, subversion or tweaking of judicial processes, Washington certainly wasn’t doing everything by the book. Long before Abu Ghraib, pictures out of Guantanamo Bay showed inhuman treatment of POWs who had not been tried or convicted. There were many red flags but they were ignored by world in the heat of the war. The fact that scores of pictures of abuse are surfacing now, and that it is not just US but British troops too who are involved, suggests the excesses are both systematic and wide-spread.
There is now an increasing sense that the scandal marks the beginning of the end of US and British occupation of Iraq.
Revulsion at US behaviour is universal. From Australia to Canada and between, even the closest US allies have bowed their heads in shame. ‘‘United States of Shame,’’ from the Scotsman and ‘‘Bush’s moral high ground slipping away’’ in the Globe and Mail are among the headlines in the world media.
Even apologists and defenders of the US occupation of Iraq, now widely seen as being premised on lies, distortions and deceit, are stunned. Some of them rationalise that harsh questioning of prisoners is inevitable in such situations and occasional excesses are part of the dirty business of war (after all, the Saddam and Saudi regimes have seen worse, they argue). But it is precisely because Bush and Blair justified the war on high moral grounds of overthrowing a regime that specialised in abuse and torture, that the revelations are so damaging.
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